It’s the Most Mysterious Movie of the Year. Will It Send You Running, Arms Aloft, Out of the Theater?

Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.Generate Key Takeaways

Although Zach Cregger’s Barbarian was a sleeper hit in 2022, his new movie, Weapons, arrives to an audience that is already wide awake. Early marketing, including a fake website relating the mysterious disappearance of 17 children from their grade-school classroom, created a sense of eerie mystery without giving away anything concrete, and while future trailers were more explicit, the true nature of the threat facing the peaceful suburb of Maybrook has remained tantalizingly opaque.

All of which presents something of a dilemma for the skittish but horror-curious viewer. Just how scary is Weapons? And how tough of a sit? A plot involving young children in peril and a title that seems to evoke a link to school shootings is enough to give some prospective viewers pause, and although Barbarian drew as much on Cregger’s comedy background—he was a founding member of the sketch group the Whitest Kids U’ Know—as on any more recent history in horror, Weapons looks substantially less likely to take a turn for the comically over-the-top. So will you have the stomach and/or nerve to make it all the way through? The Scaredy Scale is here to help.

Photo illustration by Slate. Weapons photo by Warner Bros.

Even more than Barbarian, Weapons is a slow burn of a movie. The premise revealed by those cryptic viral clips is established within the first few minutes: At precisely 2:17a.m., 17 children simultaneously leave their homes and run off into the night, never to be seen again. And for the next hour, Cregger mostly concentrates on documenting the grief and uncertainty generated by that inexplicable event. As the authorities fail to come up with so much as a hint about what happened, the parents’ sense of loss turns to anger, much of it focused on the teacher (Julia Garner) whose classroom all the missing children came from. Switching perspectives from the teacher to the cop she’s having an occasional affair with (Alden Ehrenreich), the school’s principal (Benedict Wong), and a furious father (Josh Brolin) who decides to start an investigation of his own, the movie builds each section to a provocative climax, then jumps backward in time, giving us pieces of a puzzle while holding back any sense of the bigger picture.

AdvertisementAdvertisement#_R_5bckr8lb2mav5ubsddbH1_ iframe AdvertisementAdvertisement#_R_9bckr8lb2mav5ubsddbH1_ iframe

Although there are a few hints as to where the story is going—including disorientingly brief glimpses of a figure in clown-like makeup—several of them present as dreamlike visions that turn out not to have any literal connection to the movie’s big revelation. And though the occasional periodic jump scare serves as a reminder of what kind of movie you’re watching, Cregger doesn’t try to keep the tension up at every second, giving his actors a chance to play a varied range of emotions even if it means briefly taking his foot off the gas. But once we find out exactly what kind of horror the citizens of Maybrook are facing, the dread never lets up.

Photo illustration by Slate. Weapons photo by Warner Bros.

At the climax of Barbarian, a character gets his eyes gouged out and his skull split in two, and based on the evidence of Weapons, it’s safe to conclude that Cregger likes gruesome head trauma more than any director this side of Ari Aster. The movie holds back on the bloodletting for a good long while—unless you count the moment when Ehrenreich’s cop frisks a junkie and gets stuck by a stray syringe—but once the killing starts, hoo boy. Multiple characters have their craniums pulverized or disassembled in creative ways, and there’s bone and brain matter galore. At a certain point, the gore becomes so extreme it’s darkly hilarious. (If you’ve ever chuckled at a Final Destination movie, you’ll be fine.) But if the sight of human debris turns your stomach, you’ll probably want to skip the popcorn. (The Scaredy Scale aims to be mostly spoiler-free, but if you’re especially worried about watching harm come to children, none of Weapons’ more viscerally unpleasant fates involve them.)

Photo illustration by Slate. Weapons photo by Warner Bros.

Weapons doesn’t get the Scaredy Scale’s highest ranking, but the spookiness category is where the movie really leaves a mark. Though the narration that bookends the story comes from a child’s point of view, the perspective is mostly that of a baffled adult who can’t wrap their head around the idea that something so terrible could happen in such an unremarkable place. The precision of the children’s disappearance—17 vanishing at 2:17, with two people, the teacher and one mysteriously untouched boy (Cary Christopher), left in the otherwise empty classroom—seems to hint at an at least quasi-logical explanation (keeping in mind that Barbarian’s “logic” involved generations of inbreeding producing a mutant woman strong enough to rip a person in two). But when it does come, the answer isn’t one that provides any kind of relief, and even the slapstick excess of the movie’s climax isn’t enough to dispel the overwhelming unease.

Photo illustration by Slate. Weapons photo by Warner Bros.

Weapons may be too oblique for some people’s tastes, and too concrete for others’. It likely comes down to how you feel about its ultimate villain, and whether you prefer your horror social or supernatural. But it’s a creepy, nasty good time, with scares that will make audiences jump in their seats and a few that will leave them profoundly unsettled. (One thing’s for sure: You’ll never look at a dinner fork the same way again.) Either way, it’s worth gathering up your courage and stiffening your spine for what’s likely to be the most talked-about horror movie since Sinners. The Scaredy Scale’s got your back.